Colin Fletcher & Chip Rawlins
A tome of backpacking knowledge, from what equipment is light enough yet functional enough to take with you on long trips living out of a backpack, to what to do when your living in the wild out of your pack.
Walker provides a real good (and 850 page) overview of the whole backpacking thing, what you need to bring, why, how you manage shelter and water and logistics like that. The only long trips I’ve ever taken have been in the Boundary Waters, which were a little like backpacking, but I’ve been with big groups and you don’t have much restriction in what you can carry because your packs go for the most part in your canoes.
I’ve always wanted to just drop everything for a summer and backpack one of the long trails in the US, but never organized the dropping everything for a summer part. Now that I’m done with most of my summer activities, I’m seriously looking at next summer. The Pacific Crest Trail looks like it would make for a marvelous trip, and I’m really getting tired of city life.
And why shouldn’t I. I’d just have to save up for the equipment, which should be doable.
One of the appendices at the end was a collection of quotes relating to backpacking, and when I saw one of my favorites in there it just about set my heart on a trip. I’ve been thinking almost constantly now about college, and me going there this fall. I really don’t feel that college is the right thing for me now, but who doesn’t go to college? I decided to try it out, and I’m all set and ready to go, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand the place. And if I can’t, here I come backcountry.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Thoreau, Walden, p288